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Friday’s 8×8

Wired: Kinect Hack Turns World of Warcraft Into Full-Body Grind
“Using Kinect and an open source framework tool called OpenNI, University of Southern California researcher Evan Suma and his team at the school’s Institute for Creative Technologies hacked together a middleware program called the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit, or FAAST, which lets World of Warcraft players plug Kinect directly into their computers’ USB ports. Then the software translates real-world gestures into in-game commands, so players can level-grind with their fists.”

The Atlantic: Online Sharing With StumbleUpon and Gmail Is Outpacing Facebook
“With Facebook Connect and other tools that have been released to online developers and website operators, the social networking site is betting that people are — and will continue to be — interested in reading, watching, and doing things online that their friends recommend. “It’s a shift from the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of friends,” Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told Lev Grossman for his Time magazine profile of CEO Mark Zuckerberg.”

Seeing Interactive: The Web’s Final Frontier
“It’s small businesses. I used to think it’d be grandmas or small children. But it’s not. Most people eventually understand all the personal reasons to be on the web. My grandfather has a Facebook account and knows how to check his stock portfolio. My other grandfather compulsively checks e-mail, reads the Wall Street Journal, and looks at his dubiously factual “news” sites to share conspiracies with the family.”